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Thursday, October 3, 2002 |
Athletics' Offbeat Pitcher Is a Cy Young Candidate. A young star on a relatively young team, Barry Zito has a many dimensions beyond his mix of curveballs and fastballs. By Joe Lapointe. [New York Times: Sports]
It's not often that a young player gets this kind of notice, not so much because of his great performance on the mound but because of his quirky and delightful personality. This guy could be (you'll pardon the expression) a role model of sorts for kids who want to be different.
9:43:24 PM 
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Seeking Deeper Meaning in the Babbling of Babies. Scientists believe that if they can figure out how babies learn to talk, they can better understand how language came to exist in the first place. By Mary Duenwald. [New York Times: Science]
As someone who uses language to earn a living and who has long been enamored of language per se, this article caught my eye. It makes sense to me that babies are trying to say something. My three-year-old grandson Caleb was making intelligible patterns of noise long before he began speaking words (which he did precociously).
If we can figure out how we learn language, we'll be on the verge of learning a lot about learning in the broader, more abstract context.
9:41:47 PM
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Don't Bother
Two More Weeks To Save On .Mac [MacSlash: A daily dose of Macintosh News and Discussion]
I did this upgrade a couple of weeks ago. I'm very disappointed. Backup, which is the big gain I saw in the .Mac upgrade, sucks. It breaks and almost never functions correctly. I'm not alone. Hundreds of messages on the .Mac message board and the subject is getting very little Apple attention.
Save your money. This .Mac won't be worthwhile for a while.
9:39:08 PM
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What should the world do about Saddam?. Bill Clinton electrifies a British Labor Party conference with a more sweeping vision for global peace and progress than the current president has been able to muster. [Salon.com]
I'm one of those strange people who thinks Bill Clinton was a wonderful President, personal foibles and misbehavior notwithstanding. This article adds fuel to that belief. Read what the British press had to say about his speech and his role in world affairs then and now. To think we traded his politics for those of a half-articulate cowboy who is hell-bent on running us into a war to avenge his Daddy.
5:12:55 PM
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Don't Look for an All Bay Area Series This Season!
The A's are really solid and exciting, but there's no way they beat the Yankees in a 7-game set. So the Yankees will win the ALCS and head for the World Series. As usual. Money talks and everybody else walks.
The Giants have a shot at playing in the World Series this year but I'm not holding my breath. Ifthe Cardinals defeat the D-backs, then I think the Giants have a decent shot. They match up better against the Cards than against Arizona and the old familiarity-breeds-contempt thing will be a problem for the Giants against their conference nemesis.
And as of today, it looks like St. Louis will be the Giants' opponent in the next round of the playoffs. They're up 2-0 on Zona and heading home. That one could be all over before the weekend's done. I can't tell you how much I'd love to see that!
Meanwhile, the Giants can do no worse than split in Atlanta, and that puts them in good shape for the weekend in SF.
Fun time to be a Bay Area sports fan, that's for sure.
4:55:43 PM
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One of the major reasons I forked over $50 to Apple for a .Mac membership was the promise of transparent, reliable offline backup. What a joke.
The Backkup utility Apple provides doesn't work in most circumstances when you use iDisk as your server. It is flaky at best and downright broken at worst. Apple evidently did extremely limited testing on this product/service, and now users are screaming (check out the backup discussion boards in the Help section at Apple's .Mac site).
Apple owes those of us who coughed up the bucks extensions on our subscriptions month-for-month while they get this program actually working.
It is discouraging!
4:50:09 PM
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Jaguar Increases Instability for Me
Some applications, particularly Word:X, are much less stable on Jaguar than they were on OS X 10.1. Word on the street and the discussion boards is that this is because of some change Apple made in the way fonts are handled. I don't know. What I do know is that Word crashes on my Jaguar machine at least a half-dozen times a day.
And the remedies suggested on Mactopia's discussion boards are drastic, time-consuming and, as far as I can tell, completely ineffective.
More pissing contests with you-know-how in the middle of two giant corporations arguing about whose fault it is.
What crap.
4:45:04 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Dan Shafer.
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